Category: The Technology

A brief history of my blogging

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

The ever-wonderful Jim Groom (you’ll notice I’ve linked to his blog) and the folks at Reclaim Hosting are engaged in a series of deep-diving video conversations about writing and blogging called “On Writing”. You can view the sessions on YouTube. The Reclaim crew has talked with Kate Bowles, Alan Levine, Martin Weller, Bonnie Stewart, and many more people I’ve worked with either directly or tangentially over the years.

It’s all about writing and blogging. I do both, so folks may well wonder: what is my story with blogging?

The Beginning

I began by blogging about history (because I’m a historian), but I couldn’t say exactly when (because I’m not a very good historian when it comes to my own life). The first post I have a record of was dated 2006, even though I’d been teaching online and a citizen of the internet since 1998. That first blog was hosted in a Lunarpages account, using a program (they weren’t called apps then) called Nucleus.

When I got deeply involved in educational technology and educational philosophy (c. 2008), I created a new blog in WordPress instead of just posting on my Nucleus blog. That seemed like a huge decision, and in retrospect it was. It meant bifurcating my online identity into “historian” and “educator”. Two identities, two blogs.

Blogs, blogs, and more blogs

Over time, I began to focus more and more on college teaching and ed tech, so my WordPress blog got far more attention than my history blog. And other blogs were set up. Some were for courses in which I participated, like CCK08, EC&I in 2010, and DS106 in 2011. Some were for me to use with my students as I fought the Learning Management Systems trying to control my pedagogy. I created a Tumblr and joined Twitter and became part of the online community of educators. I blogged with students and helped them set up their own blogs. I ran entire classes via blogging.  But I posted in my own space throughout, and finally pulled my Nucleus posts into my WordPress blog.

In 2012 I participated in the wave of Massive Open Online Classes, and created them for the Program for Online Teaching. That project, with volunteer faculty teaching other faculty how to teach online, had been active since 2005 and would be around till 2017. I blogged about the MOOCs, POT, online pedagogy, etc. The posts are still there.

Since 2017, I have gone back and forth separating and combining blogs, importing and exporting posts as I saw fit. Then when I retired from teaching a couple of years ago, I started a separate author blog as I became a fiction writer, since why would anyone who knew me as an author care about online teaching or educational technology?

As Alan Levine mentioned in his conversation with Maren Deepwell, blogging can seem old-fashioned. With Facebook and Threads and Instagram (oh, wait, that’s all the same thing) and Bluesky and Mastadon, what is the point of writing on a blog? Well, unless you choose to monetize your writing via Substack or Medium (tried that), your blog is the place for long-form thinking in public. It can be, as I’ve rebranded it here, your “webhome”.

Outside of blogging (and inside it’s too dark to see), I struggled with social media as a fiction author. Following all the usual advice, I spent 2023 and 2024 posting continually in FB, Instagram, TikTok, GoodReads. I did Canva placards and videos on YouTube. I put energy into an author newsletter rather than my blog. (Of course, I posted copies of my newsletter on my blog.) I even paid for ads on Facebook and Amazon. I had a few hundred followers as an author, and a few hundred newsletter subscribers.

But nothing I did in these spaces sold any books. That became my new metric for determining how I spend my time doing things I don’t find fun or interesting.

One Blog Alone

So this year I went back to my Lisahistory blog, the one that originally combined ed tech with history. I’ve cut down on social media. I’ve added an author page with its own URL (lisamlane.com) to my one blog, and closed out the separate author blog. I’m working on linking everything to my one blog, slimming down the categories, maybe writing my newsletters here, posting whenever.

Reunited and it feels so good. Blogging is fun and interesting, especially when I remember that I can post about anything I wish. No more “is this an author post? would readers be interested?” or “oh, that’s edtech–where do I put that again?”.

There has been a price: the followers I had elsewhere have been lost. But if they want to, they can find me here, in my webhome, turning on the porch light, letting Jetpack accept subscribers, chatting history and edtech and being a writer, and making a pot of tea for whoever comes by.

 

First efforts with private AI

Lisa M Lane

Generative AI isn’t new to me, but I don’t like that everything we put into ChatGTP (or any other online AI platform) will be used to train it for private corporations, who then profit from my work. So I’ve avoided it, particularly doing things like putting a whole novel in to have it write a blurb.

Now I’ve discovered a more private route, where I can use AI without the internet on my home computer (a MacBook Pro with an M2 chip).

Here’s what I did. I downloaded GPT4All, and installed it. Then I had it fetch me a couple of Large Language Models. I wanted to try the ones not associated with Meta, then I realized that DeepSeek is connected to China. So I’m trying Llama (3 8B Instruct) and Mistral (Instruct). I put the .docx versions of my Victorian mysteries, plus the “bible” I use to keep track of them, in a folder on my Mac desktop, and made those the Local Docs for it to access. Then I turned off access to the internet.

Attempt #1: a fact

Then I asked it questions, beginning with something factual: the age of my character Tommy Jones. I asked it for each book, but it couldn’t tell me. So I asked it for all books, and it couldn’t do it.

How old is Tommy Jones in these books?

Tommy Jones’ age is not explicitly stated across all contexts provided. However, based on the excerpts:
1 In “Murder on the Pneumatic Railways,” he mentions working as a bricklayer and refers to himself as possibly 25 but looking older, suggesting an age in his mid-20s or beyond.
2 He is described alongside Susie, who is seventeen at some point mentioned (though context suggests she might be younger), indicating Tommy could be either slightly older than her or of a similar age depending on the narrative progression.
Considering their background from derelict houses after their parents’ deaths in the war and their friendship with Samson, it’s likely that Tommy ranges between being a teenager to someone around his mid-20s. His exact age may vary within these bounds across different parts of the story.

Susie is a character so minor I’d forgotten about her, and Tommy’s age is explicitly stated and referenced not only in each book, but detailed in the “bible” to keep track. He was never a bricklayer, and never refers to himself as 25.  Not an auspicious beginning.

Attempt #2: a blurb

Then I asked it to write a blurb for my current work in progress, Murder at the Gasworks.

“Murder at the Gasworks” is a gripping mystery novel by Lisa M. Lane that follows Detective Sergeant Cuthbert Slaughter and Inspector Samuel Revel as they investigate the murder of a stoker at the City Gasworks in London. As they delve deeper into the case, they uncover a web of corruption, illegal activities, and threats from trade unions that may be connected to the murder. With the help of their colleagues and members of the community, they must race against time to solve the double set of murders that have perplexed them for months before the killer strikes again. Will they be able to bring justice to the victims and put an end to the dangerous game being played at the City Gasworks?

OK, well, that’s wrong. Inspector Revel is off the case for most of the book. Slaughter works with Inspector Martin, his mentor. There are absolutely no threats of any kind from trade unions — two of my characters just happen to belong to them, and one is an organizer. The race against time is pretty mild, and it’s only been about a month. The City Gasworks is only one of the two gasworks involved. When I tried again in the other LLM it used the same wording: gripping, web of corruption, race against time.

Attempt #3: reading group questions

Fine. Since I will be writing Reading Group questions for Murder at Old St. Thomas’s, I asked it to do that.

Write ten reading group questions for Murder at Old St. Thomas’s
1 What is the setting of Murder at Old St. Thomas’s and how does it contribute to the atmosphere and mood of the novel?
2 Who are some of the main characters in the novel and what motivations do they have?
3 How does the author use historical details about the hospital and its era to add depth and authenticity to the story?
4 What themes are explored in the novel, such as loyalty, betrayal, and medical experimentation?
5 How does the author use literary devices like foreshadowing and irony to create suspense and build tension throughout the novel?
6 What role do detective work and forensic science play in solving the murder at Old St. Thomas’s?
7 How does the character of Tommy Jones evolve throughout the novel and what lessons does he learn about taking on important responsibilities?
8 What is the significance of the use of anesthetics and hygienic practice during this era, and how does it relate to the murder at Old St. Thomas’s?
9 How does the author use dialogue and inner thoughts to reveal character and advance the plot?
10 What is the ultimate resolution of the murder at Old St. Thomas’s and what implications does it have for the characters and the world they inhabit?

These are extremely general questions, and don’t mention any of the characters other than Tommy. They could apply to any mystery. They are the sort of thing I would have never written for the classroom, and would lead to lousy discussion in even the most enthusiastic book group.

Attempt #4: craft and style

One more try, about craft and style:

What shows that Murder at the Gasworks is based on character rather than plot?
Murder at the Gasworks is based on character rather than plot in several ways. First, the novel focuses heavily on the motivations and personalities of the characters, particularly Detective Sergeant Cuthbert Slaughter and his colleagues. The investigation into the murders is driven by their desire to solve the case and bring justice to the victims, but also by their individual beliefs and values.
Second, the setting and atmosphere of the novel are heavily influenced by the personalities of the characters. For example, Ellie Slaughter’s neighbor Mrs Gross is portrayed as a gossipy and nosy person who is always meddling in other people’s lives. This helps to create a sense of tension and unease throughout the novel, as the reader becomes increasingly suspicious of her motives.
Finally, the plot of the novel revolves around the relationships between the characters rather than any overarching mystery or crime. The investigation into the murders is largely driven by personal connections and alliances between the detectives, as well as their individual beliefs and values. This helps to create a sense of depth and complexity in the characters and their motivations, making the novel more about character development than plot twists and turns.

It’s sort of true, though “individual beliefs and values” is simply a definition for character. And the only specific example is wrong: Mrs. Gross is a good friend and not gossipy in the slightest. She is there for comfort, not to create unease. She has no ulterior motives whatsoever.

And, of course, the plot does revolve around the crime. This isn’t literary fiction.

Assessment so far

I also tried these prompts with the internet connected, just in case the models needed to fetch something from outside (like how to write good reading group questions). The results were very similar. The tool simply couldn’t process the full content of the novels.

So far, I am less than impressed. I shall keep working at it, of course. Stay tuned.

Blogging and looking backward

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Jim Groom, edtech guru, has been conducting interviews about writing at ReclaimTV. Many of the guests have been blogging for decades, and are very familiar to me from my years teaching at a distance, such as Bryan Alexander and Audrey Watters.

One of the most interesting interviews was Kate Bowles, who hasn’t blogged for years but influenced all of us when she did and now posts on Mastadon. In a broad ranging conversation, she discussed her own public writing, including her efforts to get back into it.  She and Jim talked about how things have changed, the conversations that no longer take place on blogs, the echo chambers created by closed communities, and what survives with the prevalence of AI.

Jim Groom and Kate Bowles

 

I am late to the term “fediverse”, and the more I learn about this idea of global, open, interconnected and independent sharing, the more it sounds like the World Wide Web when it was the Wild West. I wrote about that open web, and worried about losing it, in 2011 and 2012. Free, open, share — these are words from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I became an online educator and participant.

Historians, of course, look backward all the time. The web became closed in the same way as the American frontier, through privileging commercialism and private gain. As we talk about writing publicly, we tend to want to go back to when blogging was long-form communication with call-and-response, a way to thoroughly hash through various subjects by learning about various viewponts, and writing about them. We groan about how this world has been taken over by places that are either closed (Discord) or plagued with bad actors and focused on selling things (Facebook, Instagram, X).

Taking a broader cultural perspective on the present, above and beyond the complaints of writers themselves, doesn’t help. We see long-form writing in general going out of fashion (just ask those of us who write and try to sell our novels), AI normalizing bad bland prose, and a strong desire for less junk and more meaning.

Perhaps it is best to celebrate the fact that intellectual and poetic writing is vintage. Many of the objects I value, such as record albums and landline phones, were once popular forms but are now niche. Blogging, and indeed long-form writing in general, may occupy such a place historically. We mourn this and rage, because without long-form writing it is impossible to posit a convincing argument, present evidence of an outlandish thesis, or tell a full and meaningful story.

It doesn’t really matter where we do it, and if the fediverse* is the place for it, I’m in.

 

(*NB: for the record, I think that term is awful – I much prefer open web)

AI image making

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

So I come upon an article on Medium about creating images from text descriptions, and it occurs to me this might be a cool way to make book covers. The technologies the article suggested required complex signups, so I searched and found NightCafe instead and tried it.

I chose “oil painting” and the “coherent” filter, typed in Victorian street Grimshaw and got this:

Apart from the weird sky, I cannot tell what the hell that figure is supposed to be. I can only tell it’s a person because it has feet.

Next effort:empty victorian street streetlamp cobbles cabriolet cloudy day.

Huh. Skies full of cobbles. OK, how about Victorian London, the artistic filter, and the “steampunk” setting:


The architecture is better, but what is that thing? I write historical mysteries. OK, so no steampunk setting, just Victorian London street and “oil painting”, back to the coherent filter:

Another creepy non-person. And that vehicle? Yeah, right.

OK, so historical isn’t happening. I’ll try what it’s supposed to do, fantasy. Moonlit Thames river boat, with the “heavenly” style and the artistic filter.

So, love the idea. Not thrilled with the execution. But I’m interested in looking more into this for sure!

Quick messaging with students in Canvas

Lisa M Lane

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted so I remember something, but a faculty member asked how I did this:

It looks like it’s just a link in the menu that says “* Message Lisa”, but it’s so much more. You’ll notice to the left, in the system-wide blue menu, is the Inbox. This is what students are told to use to message their instructor. But when you go there, you have to search for the instructor, by course and by name, before you get a window where you can type your message. That’s stupid. It should be easy to contact your instructor.

But my “* Message Lisa” link doesn’t just go to the Inbox. It opens a window immediately where they can type their message, with all the fields (their course, their name) filled in already. No searching required.

For that link, it’s tricky. Each course in Canvas has its own link to the instructor’s inbox. The format is this:

https://YOURCANVASINSTALLATION.com/conversations?context_id=course_COURSEID&user_id=USERID&user_name=CANVASNAME

So for me in course #29474 that’s:

https://miracosta.instructure.com/conversations?context_id=course_29474&user_id=83&user_name=Lisa%20M%20Lane

To find the course number, you can go to any assignment inside your class and look at the URL, or you can mouse over the class tile in the Dashboard. To find your user number, mouse over anywhere your name is linked in the class (like at the top of an Announcement). To find your user name, see your Profile.

Then I use the Redirect App in the Settings – Apps, and create it as a link, just changing the course number for each course. It rolls over each term, so I just have to change the course number each time.

The centrality of the textbook

Lisa M Lane

It is an axiom frequently ignored that any technology has to have a reason to exist in a class. The textbook is a technology. If one were to actually read it, that would be a huge investment of time in an era where attention is continually diverted. A chosen technology is either central to learning or it shouldn’t be there at all.

Students, understandably, won’t read the textbook without stakes (a quiz, a paper). Increasingly, many students cannot sustain the attention and access the vocabulary skills required to read one.

As a result, publishers and professors have developed ways to force students to read the textbook. Publisher’s courses read the book aloud to the student, provide embedded quizzes and pop-up vocabulary as they go, and assess performance before pushing the grades into the Learning Management System. Annotation systems like Perusall make it possible for students to annotate a textbook together. These approaches are far too much if we only want the textbook as background.

I confess that I’ve edited several textbooks of my own that I use in my classes. These are classes where I have substantial lecture material, so the book is context. For the first two years of the pandemic, I made reading them optional and eliminated book quizzes, but now that students are more accustomed to online learning, I’m bringing them back, with some regret.

             my new OER textbook

This regret is coloring my view as I design two “new” World History classes (I’ve only taught them in the classroom and that was many years ago). For the first, I’ve spend the last several months with the Cengage textbook I’ve chosen, and made it central to the short recorded lectures. In these lectures I explain the chapter, note its strengths and weaknesses, clarify points. The lecture itself is quizzed internally, using the quiz function in Canvas Studio. Class starts in a little over a week. I hope it works, but either way I’ve made the book central to the class.

Now I think about the other half of the course. For this one, world history to 1500, I have found an Open Educational Resource, a free textbook. Of course, it’s only free in its electronic form. So I’m thinking how to use it, since it must be central. I have no lectures prepared for the class, and am not sure I want them.

So, a new idea. Since it’s free and electronic, I could put it inside Perusall, the social annotation program. But instead of expecting students to annotate, or requiring that they do it (as I do with primary sources), perhaps I’ll put in the annotations little videos of me, glossing the text myself that way. Perhaps I’ll ask questions, invite participation, and grade it in Perusall.

In the old days we turned up our noses at “teaching from the textbook”, ridiculing those who tied their lectures to it. Perhaps we felt that we could leave students alone with the textbook, and they’d read and understand it. I doubt this was ever true, but in a world where we can chose to eschew the textbook entirely, create ungrading schemes, and have at our fingertips more resources to share than ever before, we should consider the textbook differently.

Why your LMS sucks

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

During the pandemic year many faculty have been forced to create fully online classes in a Learning Management System, such as Canvas or Blackboard. It has been surprisingly difficult. Even those fluent in technologies like email and social media have been flummoxed by the difficulties of using the LMS as an online classroom. There are three main reasons why.

Got folders?

Learning Management Systems appear to be innocent shells into which teachers load “content”, but in reality they each have their own built-in pedagogy. This pedagogy is often archaic and is based on outdated norms of information organization. In the 1990s, LMSs imitated the folder-style structure of Mac and PC (Windows) operating systems. They were really just places to upload content items (usually Word files) and perhaps run a single discussion board (by 2005 or so).

Surprisingly, even when LMSs added more and more features to enable greater interaction and activity, they retained the old structure. It is designed to present material by type: Pages, Lectures, Discussion, Grades, etc. You can see this in the way the menu is constructed.

Presentation by type undermines the organizational integrity of the course. Most scholars think in terms of their field, and how best to present its habits of mind. As teachers, we think next in terms of wrapping elements together to encourage understanding. We do not think in terms of all the articles, all the lectures, all the exams, all the discussions.

Instead, we think in terms of weeks, or units, or modules. We section the learning, combining various elements to cover a particular subject. Separating those resources by type makes no sense when one is creating a pattern of learning.

One solution is to break this framework. If the LMS allows us to add, delete, or hide menu items,we can make new pages which link to the whole pattern of information. It may be possible, for example, to have the menu say Module 1, Module 2, etc., instead of Announcements, Syllabus, Pages, Discussion, Quizzes.

Even so, the system may force its own design. We may have a Module 1 page with all the links to activities, but when the student clicks on that activities, the breadcrumbs may show the folder name (“Quizzes”). Students can get lost following these.

Student-led what?

None of the major LMSs make it easy to implement constructivist or connectivist learning theory. Unlike twenty years ago, instructors may have studied and be trained in active learning teachniques, and have been using them in the classroom. When faced with the LMS, they find themselves stymied.

Created student-led or student-designed work is difficult. LMSs require teacher permissions to set up an assignment, quiz, content area, or discussion. Although some discussion forums allow students to begin topics, this feature must also be set by the instructor.

Some systems seems to be more adaptable, or at least expandable. In LMSs like Canvas, LTI’s (tools using the Learning Tools Interoperability standard) can be added to the system with varying levels of success. An example might be an improved discussion board, or Google Docs, or a group annotation app. Some integrate fairly well into the LMS, making them easy to access from inside the shell and pushing grades back into the system. But all require a bit of technical expertise to set up, and the integration is rarely seamless. Some, like Google Docs, may require students to have a separate Google account, while others need their own structural folder inside the LMS for all activity related to that app. This is particularly true of textbook publishers’ material, which often tries to integrate the publisher’s own textbook site with the LMS.

The solutions here take one of three directions: the internal approach, the LTI approach, or the textbook publisher approach.

Since students can be given control of discussion boards, the internal approach would include using them for different kinds of activity other than discussion: posting lists of websites, sharing resources, posting quotations from reading. The other folder areas (quizzes, pages, etc) can simply not be used.

The LTI approach would involve using more collaborative tools, like Google Docs or group annotation apps or pinboards as the main outside tool, with the instructor learning it well and monitoring it thoroughly.

The textbook publisher approach would be to ignore or hide everything possible in the LMS navigation and use the publisher’s folder as the main work area.

Fifteen papers due today!

Gone are the days when your class was the only online class students were taking. They are now enrolled in many classes within the same LMS at the same institution. In an effort to help them remember the deadlines for everything, the LMS aggregates all the information from all the courses into task lists, using a Calendar or To Do feature.

For example, a conditional release feature makes it possible to prevent a student performing Task B (a test) before they have done Task A (an assignment). Task A is designed to prepare the student for Task B, and ideally would be done within a short period of concentration. But on the student’s Calendar they see Task A, then Task 1 from another class, then Task iii from yet another class, before Task B. By the time they get to Task B, they have no idea what was learned in Task A. An example from three of may classes, running at the same time:

Same day, three different classes

Perhaps you have designed a module to lead students through an introduction, then a short lecture, then a video, then a discussion, then a test. All of these will be disaggregated by due date and will appear in a jumble on the students’ Calendar. Wrapping elements for your class together to encourage deeper understanding becomes impossible.

In addition, by listing all the tasks from all the classes together, the Calendar or List “flattens” all the assignments. It becomes impossible to tell which tasks are more or less important to the student, to learning, or to the grade. They all look equivalent in the same font and size, even if one is a two-minute video and the other is a paper that would take several days.

Unfortunately, this problem may not be solvable. Few LMSs allow control over whether or not to show calendars and lists to students. Because permissions for such features run above the individual course level, instructors usually have no access to any methods that would change the LMS behavior.

The bottom line

Creative pedagogy can work within the limitations of the LMS, but it is not easy to implement. Systems are designed to systematize, and the LMS is designed to create cookie-cutter classes based on outmoded structures rather than to promote innovative approaches. Thus for many of us, understanding its design is essential to adapting, subverting, or acquiescing to its suckiness.

 

Also published on Medium

Canvas is not your friend

Lisa M Lane

Instructure’s Canvas continues to gain market share as the Learning Management System in colleges and universities, despite limitations which have become more apparent as more faculty teach online. Want to assign extra credit? That’s really hard. Want students to maintain individual graded journals? Super difficult. Want to use the shell to create student-led learning? Forget about it.

And yet schools have been overjoyed to adopt Canvas as the new friend who will help with everything while not having too many needs. It’s so easy to use, everyone says. It looks so simple and clean and Google-y. Students like how all their classes look the same, reducing their cognitive load.

But for the more creative teacher or professor, those interacting with it intensely rather than casually, associating with Canvas exposes its shortcomings and begins to cause frustration. Faculty who have had more useful relationships with other systems know exactly what’s missing, but even those new to the playground are stymied when trying to get a simple friendly response.

The fact is, Canvas is not our friend. That’s because its design forces us to engage with its emotional problems.

Navigating like it’s 2005

Canvas is stuck in old patterns of thinking, even when those patterns cause problems again and again.

Learning Management Systems appear to be innocent shells into which teachers load “content”, but in reality they each have their own built-in pedagogy. Canvas’s pedagogy (like its other market leader, Blackboard) is based on outdated norms of information organization. In the 1990s, LMSs imitated the folder-style structure of Mac and PC (Windows) operating systems. They were really just places to upload content items (usually Word files) and perhaps run a single discussion board (by 2005 or so).

Surprisingly, even when LMSs added more and more features to enable greater interaction and activity, they retained the old structure. It is designed to present material by type: Pages, Lectures, Discussion, Grades, etc. You can see this in the way the Canvas menu is constructed.

Menu on left, and text saying “friends don’t let friends have eighteen menu items”

Most teachers do not think in terms of “type”. We think in terms of weeks, or units, or modules. We section the learning, combining various elements to cover a particular subject, assigning a reading, practice test, discussion, and exam all on the same topic. Separating those resources by type makes no sense when one is creating a learning pathway for students to follow, and can undermine the organizational integrity of the course.

Trying to help

But Canvas promises an alternative navigation for the students: Modules. You can put all your tasks in the correct order under headings. The “Back” and “Next” buttons, which automatically follow your sequence, will ensure that students stay within their lane.

                                    Exciting Modules page for Chapter 4

Unfortunately, this doesn’t solve the problem. Canvas’s Modules page is a list of links, with every item listed in the same size and color. But the menu items, ever visible even on the Modules page, will still say Pages, Assignments, Discussion, etc.

One can try to break this framework. Since we can add, delete, or hide menu items, it is possible to make new pages which link to the whole pattern of information. It may be possible, for example, to have the menu say Module 1, Module 2, etc., instead of Announcements, Syllabus, Pages, Discussion, Quizzes.

You could use the Modules pages as a home page, even though it’s ugly. Or you could make all the menu items for types invisible, and build a Home page with a schedule or grid, and each unit could be a list of links. Students can then see how everything fits together for that week.

But no…

Both solutions will be undermined by Canvas’s internal navigation. Even if you set up Page-based or Modules navigation, the “breadcrumbs” will show everything by type anyway. Any student going from your Week 2 page of links to Quiz 2 will see a breadcrumb in the upper left saying “Quizzes”. It they click it, the full list of all the quizzes in the class appear. Ditto with Discussion 2 — the full list of discussions will be there, and students will start jumping around and get lost.

Canvas provides the way to make things right, then undermines its own good intentions.

Working in five classes at once

Canvas wants everything combined for convenience, ignoring all your plans.

Let’s say you create a learning pathway through the content, considering the holistic nature of your course, using Modules or Pages. The Calendar and the To Do list will immediately come along and destroy your careful course structure, by disaggregating all the tasks in all your students’ various classes and lumping them together into a giant list.

For students, as a convenience, the Calendar lists everything from all their classes in order of due date. When they look at the month’s or week’s tasks, everything from all their classes is listed, making it difficult to see the order of anything for one particular class. Your “Discussion 2” which you carefully designed to follow Reading 2 has another class’s “Discussion 4″ in between.

The To Do list does the same thing in an even simpler list that appears on the Dashboard and every course home page.

In addition, both the Calendar and the To Do list don’t include anything that isn’t graded. That might include the week’s main page, the discussion students are supposed to return to on two different dates, or a required reading. Students will miss ungraded assignments entirely as they innocently follow these helpful lists.

What to do?

Because the Calendar and To Do features are controlled above the course level, there is no way to make them invisible or change them, except by adding more items from your class. There is limited space in the title, especially when the Calendar or To-Do List is seen on a phone, so we cannot put “Eng101” as the first word to help. But we can add additional Calendar items for things that aren’t connected to a graded item: “Week 2 starts today”, or “Return to discussion”, or “essay corrections due”. When we make an ungraded assignments, we can check the “Add to To Do list” box. Adding more things to do may be, strangely, the best way to help students.

Relying on others for basic functions

Canvas has no inner reserves of strength, and relies on outsiders.

It is a truth generally acknowledged that Canvas’s discussion boards are the most troublesome element of the LMS. Conversation is not its strong suit. Canvas requires an administrative setting to do things like make the barely nested posts obvious in a threaded discussion. There is so much white space that one scrolls until one forgets the topic — it isn’t practical to engage in extended, much less semester-long, discussions. There is no distinction between instructor posts and student posts. The toolbar cannot be customized, so it has become bloated and even more difficult to use than when it had fewer features. There is no @ feature or notification sent to students to let them know someone has responded to their post, unless they subscribe to all posts on all boards in the class.

Canvas is very instructor-focused, making student-led learning difficult to design. There are no collaborative or whiteboard spaces built in. Extending Canvas means using LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) apps, or what used to be called “plug-ins”. These are made by external providers, and vary widely in cost and ease of use. Some integrate better than others, passing grades back into the Canvas Gradebook with ease. Others force students to create external accounts.

Given these difficulties, it is often easiest for faculty to succumb to the temptation of using a big stick: the textbook publisher package. The big companies offer full packages that can plug in to a Canvas course, essentially connecting their own learning management system to Canvas. This adds another layer and another (sometimes more than one) menu item as a “type”. Then it becomes necessary to spend much time learning the publisher’s complicated system as well as Canvas.

Less may be more

The only solution here is to limit oneself to one LTI. If it’s the publisher package, all the time will be spent learning and dealing with that. If it’s Google Docs, that will have a learning curve too, and possibly external accounts. If group annotation is desired, that can be the only extension.

Being honest with each other

These three big flaws don’t even include the many inconsistencies and gaps that Canvas has had since the beginning. There is no way to change things in bulk, like assignment due dates or quiz instructions. There is no pop-up to alert students that a message awaits from their teacher. There is no font customization on the Modules page, which flattens everything and makes it look like a two-minute video is equivalent to a twenty-page chapter. The drag-and-drop Calendar won’t let you drag-and-drop items from one month to another.*

One should not expect a friend, especially a troublesome friend, to change. Until 2015 there was a chance the relationship would improve. Indeed, things had been improving with help from the Canvas Community, a rich resource of teachers and expert users. But once Instructure went public, they became answerable to shareholders, just like Blackboard. Their “open source” street cred died, as did their need to respond to users.

It may be be best to consider Canvas as a flawed, if necessary, companion. It has its own desires and needs, which will often be counter to yours. But its unreliability means it’s best not to get too dependent.

*Update: Kona Jones has pointed out to me a couple of revisions. One can drag-and-drop to a different month if you start with an undated item from the list, and a recent update now means that Canvas includes bulk editing of Assignment dates only.

The increasingly possible: online labs

Lisa M Lane

Ever since I discovered the back pages in H. G. Wells’s Text-book of Biology, (1893),  I’ve known a bit about scientific work being done at home. Doing “practical work” at home was important for correspondence education at the end of the 19th century, so that students could study for examinations even if they didn’t have access to a laboratory.

When online teaching started at our college, back in 1998, and began to grow, a number of science instructors were concerned. You could do a lecture online, fine, but you couldn’t do a lab. Simulations weren’t enough, they said. You need real materials. Wells’s students, of course, had real materials. They ordered them by mail or, in the case of frogs, went and caught them.

So here we are in 2020, with online labs foisted onto unsuspecting faculty, and they’ve done brilliantly. I attended this session, where four professors, from auto shop to biotechnology, showed how they do labs online. For inspiration alone it’s worth the 50+ minutes.

MiraCosta College: Hands-On Labs in an Online World on Vimeo.

It’s an odd feeling for me, a promoter and practitioner of online education since the 1990s, to see that the materials (lab kits, go-pro cameras, etc) have come so far. But it’s even more thrilling to see the new attitudes, confidence, and willingness to serve students this way. It feels (finally!) like the new world we were hoping for.

As I watched, I thought like a student. In-person education isn’t always the best way to learn. When I was 19, if I’d had a way to learn about cars without having  to show my ignorance to the guys in auto shop, I might know how to fix my car today. I was shy, and had already been subject to sexism in art class — I certainly wouldn’t walk into a guy-dominated shop. I was also clumsy, but if I’d been able to make mistakes with those test tubes at home, I might have given it a try in high school or college. (I actually had a chemistry set as a child, and created something so horrid the chemistry prof at the local university had to be called so we knew how to dispose of it.)

At any rate, I think H. G. Wells would be proud. I’m delighted.

Lecture: recorded, zoomed, or what?

Lisa M Lane

The word “lecture” conjures an idealized image of students listening attentively as a professor relays knowledge. Almost all of the lectures I enjoyed at university were in this format, and when I began teaching I lectured this way too.

With this year’s quick and unexpected transition to online teaching, many professors assumed that online lecture meant reproducing what they do in class. Zoom.com was grateful for this assumption, even as they struggled to accommodate the massive numbers holding live lectures. Almost immediately, however, there were complaints and problems.

Professors whined that students weren’t paying attention, or didn’t want to turn on their cameras. They couldn’t see the facial expressions and body language indicating comprehension (or lack thereof). Students complained about boring, wandering lectures, and they felt exposed. You can’t sit at the back in an online classroom, and they didn’t want thirty strangers to see the trailer they lived in. Many decided they would watch the recording instead.

The problem? Zoom provided the platform, but the pedagogy was still based in the classroom. This worked better for some professors than others. At our college, they let us choose before this fall whether we wanted our classes scheduled and in Zoom, or “online only” (meaning asynchronous, with no live meetings), or a mix. Many professors regretted their choice.  Those in Zoom wished they hadn’t, and those who chose asynchronous were sorry they’d done that.

For two decades, I’ve been pushing the idea that the technology should follow the pedagogy. Your preferred teaching method should dominate. In the rush, there had been no connection between a professor’s pedagogy and their choice of format.

So, assuming you lecture, what kind of lecturer are you?

Interactive lecturers count on student participation. They ask questions during lecture, or survey the mood, or set tasks for students during the lecture.

Interactive lecturers should consider live (synchronous) lecturing in Zoom or another webconferencing program. The live approach online, however, works best for the simple lecture, on one topic. Shortening lecture time by about 2/3 is also a good idea for live session lectures, but they can be immediately followed by breakout room activity.

Traditional lecturers are those who lecture to an audience, and don’t expect, need, or want the lecture to be interactive. They relay a lot of information, framed by their own interpretation from their professional experience.

Traditional lecturers should record these lectures, and students can view them in an asynchronous way. Students particularly appreciate recorded lectures when the topic is complex, so they can go back and review without being on the spot.

Online lecturers, long ago, were all using dial-up modems and there wasn’t much bandwidth. A lecture quickly became a typed out version of ones lecture notes. As bandwidth expanded, these written lectures could be enhanced with images, then audio, then video. Written lectures can be more like reading, or they can be multi-media experiences, but they’re based on the web page or blog. They may include recorded mini-lectures. Like traditional lectures, they tend to be asynchronous.

So, planning to offer a 90-minute lecture on the historiography of the fall of ancient Rome? Go ahead, but considering recording it with images or video clips rather than doing it live. Want to lecture on solving a quadratic equation, using a whiteboard and asking students to help as you go? Consider a live lecture. Already wrote a great article that covers everything that would be in this week’s lecture? Record your voice reading it, and add some pictures or video clips.

But we don’t all have a choice. Have you been told you have to fill 75 minutes of scheduled class time? Consider creating interactive lectures and activities that require working together. Or have students view a recorded lecture, then come to the synchronous class to work out problems or just do their homework together. I would consider this a flipped online classroom, a model that understands that absorbing information may be best done on ones own but applying it should be done together.

So as we approach spring, let’s consider.

Behind the scenes?

Lisa M Lane

We’re nearing the end of summer term, so I get two different kinds of emails: one asking for an extension on the final essay, and the other thanking me for the class.

I’m happy to deal with both (yes, you may have an extension — we’re in a plague, dammit). But the emails thanking me are so nice. One of my top students wrote me that even though they unfortunately could not see or meet me, she always knew I was behind the scenes, helping them through it.

Gratifying, certainly. I love that they know I’m there for them. On my student survey, I have a question on the Lickert scale: “I felt that Lisa was really present and visible during this class.” I get extremely high marks on this, which makes me proud. But last spring, they were a little lower. And now, a student feels I was “behind the scenes”.

                                  CC Flickr Osman Kalkavan

I used to work in theatre. A lot. I was a lighting designer, sound board operator, props person, stage manager, and I even directed once. I know “behind the scenes”.

But my online class? I have all of these roles, plus I am the actor on the stage. My lectures are written out, and they are original. They can click a button and hear me reading them. I have video recordings of me talking to them for each unit. The whole production is mine. I’ve even put together the textbook. I am the show. I’m not just behind the scenes.

So why do they think so? Because I’m not doing synchronous. I’m not using Zoom.

Thank you, pandemic, for making people think that the only way to teach, the only way to get to know your professor, is live on camera. It isn’t. Asynchronous education is brilliant. It allows people to learn when they can, from anywhere. For the past 20 years of asynchronous teaching, I’ve developed solid relationships and firm friendships, students who write from wherever they are to keep in touch years later. None of them have ever said it was unfortunate we never “met”, because we meet all the time.

But within the span of a few short months, even students who don’t want to be on camera think that’s how it’s supposed to be. Administrators have cleverly figured out that this is the way to make sure faculty are doing the work. They have always suspected that, even though studies show that teaching online takes more hours than classroom teaching, we’re all here shirking in our summer shorts. Now they can track camera time.

As videoconferencing company shares go through the roof, I’m here to tell you: it’s only one method. It can be used effectively, for getting a group or class together to do something meaningful that requires being together. It can be used badly, for watching students take an exam or for enforcing attendance.

And you’d think the plague would have demonstrated the limitations of synchronous learning. I don’t just mean the frozen frames students have on Zoom so they can do something else. I mean the students who are first responders, whose parents are dying in hospitals while they sit and cry in their car in the parking lot, the ones doing double shifts at the food bank. They want to go to school, and they can’t be online every Tuesday and Thursday from 10-11:50 am. That was the whole idea of online education in the first place: to accommodate those who couldn’t do the butts-in-seats thing.

So I’m thrilled the student knew I was there. I really am. I have spent many hours this summer conversing with individual students through messages and emails, often responding minutes after they write me. It’s real. It is the scene, not just behind the scenes.

 

Working against Canvas: three tips

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

So many instructors, some of whom have used Canvas as their LMS for their on-site classes, are now encountering the system’s complexities and limitations. Teaching fully online is different from posting ones class resources online, or at least it should be.

My advice has changed from three years ago, because Canvas itself has changed.  My reasoning, however, has not changed from eleven years ago. My article on Insidious Pedagogy: How course management systems affect teaching (2009) explained how the designs of learning management system tend to control pedagogy, especially among novice users. We need to spend some time working against the system.

So I’ve reduced my top ten tips to three. And they may well be suitable for LMSs and VLEs other than Canvas.

1) Create full navigation using Pages

As with LMSs of old, Canvas continues to default to grouping content and assignments by type. This is a holdover from Blackboard, which relied on the early computer analogies of “files and folders” to imitate paper filing systems. So “Lectures” can be a folder, “Discussions”, “Quizzes”, etc.

But for most of us, learning is time-oriented, or theme-oriented, not type-oriented. We tend to have units with multiple types of content and activities. Many of these are organized by unit or week. There is no way to express this to students without making a page of links.

Canvas, of course, has a Modules page with a list of links. On the Modules page, you can load in everything, and have students do things in sequence, or with prerequisites, or both. The Modules page is, and has always been, ugly. The most you can do is add emojis to the headings, if you know how. And every item listed on the Modules page is the same size and color, creating the impression that everything listed has the same worth. All you can do is indent, or use caps.

The best Canvas classes I’ve seen have a schedule or grid on the main page:

Each of the links goes to a Canvas page, which has links of the activities and content:

One can of course put all these in the Modules page also, which will enable the “Back” and “Next” buttons for those into sequences and control. Then it’s up to you whether to show that Modules page, because you also ought to. . .

2) Hide menu items

This has not changed from earlier advice: features we are not using, or that we don’t want students accessing from the menu, should not appear on the menu.

For Canvas, this involves going to Settings – Navigation and dragging the items you don’t want visible down to the inactive area. It used to be that when you did this and saved, neither you nor the students saw these items on the menu, and the look was clean. Recently, Canvas changed this so that the instructor sees them all, but with the hidden items indicated by a crossed-out eye.

Well, at least students don’t see them.

3) Do low-stakes stuff anyway

Here working against Canvas means working with it. Students need reasons to work on your class, and to get immediate feedback. This is difficult in Canvas. Doing extra credit, creating short quizzes, using test question banks, all are ridiculously complicated. And there is still no easy way to just copy a quiz.

Canvas will also passively prevent what you want to do. Want to create a discussion forum where everyone who posts twice gets 3 points? Can’t do it. Want to have 20 questions on a 10-point quiz, so each question is worth half a point? No can do. Want to rename an assignment and have all the internal links still work? Good luck. Want to change all 28 due dates to a week later? It’s a one-at-a-time job. (At least there’s a hack for this one.)

It pays to spend some time seeing what can be done with zero-point assignments, and complete/incomplete grades, and the default grade feature in the Gradebook. Students learn from short, formative assessments.

Working against the LMS has always been required for us to teach the way we want to. More and more, I see LMS trainings covering these problems, and teaching the workarounds, which is great. Particularly when your LMS is owned by an equity firm, after going public and answering to shareholders, we can be sure that improvement is unlikely (most Canvas problems have been around since its inception). We must be willing to work against the system.

 

 

Armchair historian does London Bridge

Lisa M Lane

Historians sometimes reinvent themselves. Or maybe it’s better to say that historians who are very famous, or not famous at all, sometimes reinvent themselves. If you’re very famous (like Simon Schama) you can do whatever you like. If  you’re basically unknown (like me) you can also do whatever you like. But if you’re an acknowledged expert about One Big Thing, I suspect you can’t do anything else.

I’ve been working for a few years on making Victorian England my new specialty, and I’m also writing a novel that takes place in 1862. To find good resources and just enjoy the era, I’ve joined some Victorian-focused Facebook groups. People post old photos:

These are London Bridge in 1890, the top one facing north, the other facing south. And oh, the traffic! I’ve read that the bridges were often jammed in the 1860s, and it looks like by 1890 they weren’t any better. Can’t you just imagine yourself trying to cross the street?

Then someone on Facebook asked whether the stairway was still there:

 

Let’s go look! (And get a load of all the “temporarily closed” on Google. Might want to take some screenshots — this will all be history too, remember).

 

 

So I “drop down” my little G droid* and go look.

 

 

Hmmm… looks like maybe the top of a stairway? I’d better drop down by the river bank for closer inspection.

 

A ramp! Much nicer than stairs for lots of people. Plus you don’t have to go out past the church and turn left to get onto the bridge.

The ease of doing this sort of thing amazes me. An armchair traveler in the 19th century could sit at home and read books to go to wonderful places all over the world. I can drop down my G droid anywhere and walk around (well, click around).

I can’t go to England this year, but I can do this. The Google Map images are relatively recent. I can walk down streets. I can look up old maps and then go see what’s different (I do that all the time for research). I can even go to webcams like this one and see places in real time. I can start up Google Earth and see buildings in three dimensions.

All of which beats relying on H. Rider Haggard for my view of the world. But I would like a wingback chair, please.

 

___
*I know the droid is called “Pegman”, but why should it be a man? I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a man.

Perusing pictures

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

I almost forgot, in all the madness, that I am trying an experiment in my History of Technology class. I detailed the idea in my post from July. But I hadn’t implemented it till this semester.

First a review: in every class I teach online, instead of a traditional discussion board, I assign a set of primary source documents. I put these in Perusall (using the LTI in Canvas), uploaded as a pdf. Students then can select parts of the text, and annotate it. They can respond to each others annotations, and add images or video to help each other read the material.

This semester I’ve tried it with images. I put together two sets of images in Microsoft Word, one for images from the Book of Hours of the Duc de Berry (for the Middle Ages), and one for a collection of postcards from the early 20th century imagining the world in 2000 (for the turn of the 20th century). I then saved each collection as a pdf, and uploading them into Perusall.

I’ve just been reviewing the latter. The History of Technology class is always difficult to get talking. The class attracts a wonderful assortment of students, particularly those in computer science or who already work in information technology. They don’t tend to be much for chit-chat, and some of the written articles on technological history don’t interest them. The pictures, however, have created much more participation.

You can see here that not only did they comment on the images, but that they also replied a lot to each other (the bubble with the number is replies to the comment showing).

So I’m calling this one a success, and plan to do more!

Use these words in a paragraph

Lisa M Lane

I remember this exercise from grade school. We were given a list of terms, and told to use them in a paragraph. Not define them, but use them.

If I’d done the reading, this could go several ways. If I’d understood the overall point of what I had read, the first sentence of the paragraph was easy, and then I could assemble the terms, sort of, even if I didn’t know what they all meant. It was like a deductive method. If I knew what they all meant but not how they went together, I could still write something, and if the sentences followed each other logically, I was good. Let’s call this the inductive method.

If I hadn’t done the reading, of course, I was f***ed.

Necessity being the mother of invention, I had a hole in my syllabus when I dropped my History of England textbook. Well, textbook is a bit of a misnomer. It was a brilliant atlas, deeply loved (by me, anyway) but hard to obtain. With the book gone, what remains are only my lectures and the primary sources for readings. Of course, that’s quite a bit. My lectures are fairly complete. More importantly, the sources are items like Magna Carta and More’s Utopia. I want them understood, so I’ve put them in Perusall for annotation. But group annotations are a bit deceptive — it’s entirely possible for the individual student to have misunderstood an entire document.

So since I have no intention of writing multiple-choice quizzes (ick), I instead have created Document Paragraphs. The instructions say:

While I haven’t actually said “use these terms in a paragraph”, that’s what they do. And I can very quickly tell what they understood and what they didn’t. It also helps align the Persuall annotations (which I call Read and Discuss) with something they must produce. It scores an automatic 2 points, but for the first several weeks I’m very careful about giving them feedback to improve, if needed.

So just a note to thank all those teachers I had for “use these terms in a paragraph”.

 

 

Honor in defeat

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

In all my years of online teaching (and it’s over 20, mind) I have never had a worse start to the semester. My inbox is receiving student messages at the rate of about 3 per hour, and has done the entire first week. These messages are, as I’ve mentioned before, mostly related to not being able to find things. Many indicate that they haven’t read my announcements, so all have required individual responses.

This is heart-breaking for me, and not because of the time suck. My navigation in my courses has always been my pride. Students frequently mention on evaluations the ease of getting around the course, the knowledge of knowing what is due and when, the way the class hangs together. One Canvas feature, the To-Do list on the app, has put an end to all of that.

When the LMS undermines the integrity of my courses, it puts me in a bind. The disaggregation of content creates larger problems, as I’ve noted. I am being defeated by Canvas. The question is whether I can snatch honor from defeat.

The solutions I articulated last time, the new rules, are proving to be difficult to implement in Canvas.

For example, it is clear that proximity of content to task is crucial when students engage class material through disparate tasks. Reading must be together with a quiz or writing on that reading. Self-reported items must have the self-reported task alongside the submission. So what’s the problem?

The To-Do Lists

Canvas makes this much more difficult than it has to be, because the To-Do list itself is a fickle beast. Over the last 48 hours, I have learned a lot about it. There are, it turns out, several To-Do lists. One appears when you open the Home page of the course itself (let’s call this List A):

It includes Calendar events, so it would tell students everything they need. Unfortunately, it is useless, since the problem is that students no longer go to the course Home page in the first place.

Another To-Do list is on the new, improved Student Dashboard (List B). For some reason, it prefaces everything with the words, “Turn in”:

This is on the right side of what is basically a home page for the entire Canvas system for the college, and the Canvas folks don’t seem to understand that students don’t go there either. One reason is that it’s utterly cluttered with college announcements. It also does not include Calendar events.

Here is what students see in the tool they’ve suddenly started to use now that all their MiraCosta classes are in Canvas, the aggregated To-Do list on their phone in the app (List C). It also uses “Turn in”:

No Calendar events, no ungraded assignments. Here are the other things they can see on their phone:

The Inbox (Messages) Notifications (the default is Announcements and Message) Events (which shows only those manually added to the calendar) Dashboard with tiles

My student account is set as a student in five of my classes, so imagine all these from different classes, in different colors.

As far as I can tell, almost all of the students now only use the To-Do list in the app, List C. The questions I’ve received indicate that few use the Notifications, which is where all my Announcements would appear. These don’t appear on the To-Do list, implying that reading them is not something one needs To Do.

The Attempt to Solve This

Since they cannot see either the week’s readings or my lectures in the To-Do list, surely the trick was to get these to appear.

Option 1: Add everything to the Calendar as an event on a date

This would be easiest, but it didn’t work, because the app To-Do list does not show Calendar events.

Option 2: Make a page for each reading and lecture and check the box “Add to student to-do list”

I thought I could make a page for each reading and each lecture, then click the “Add to student to-do list” box, and they would be visible!

But it turns out this is not the case. Things added using the “Add to student to-do list” box only appear on the Course home page list (List A) or the Student Dashboard (List B), not the app To-Do list.

Option 3: Make readings into 0-point assignments or ungraded quizzes or surveys

No dice. It turns out nothing will appear on the To-Do list in the app unless it is a graded discussion, assignment, or quiz.

So that leaves me with only one option: make everything graded.

Grading and ungrading

No way am I grading every time they do a reading or view a lecture. Out of the question.

So the other possibility: ungrading.

I have never been a true believer in ungrading, or in the honor system. I allow it for some items, but not for others, and for those self-reported items I not infrequently discover plagiarism, dishonesty, or inferior work. The point of the system is to give feedback on this work, which I can do only up to a point.

The way to force ungraded tasks to appear on the app To-Do list is to adapt Laura Gibbs’ brilliant self-reporting quizzes and embed the material or link it in the instructions to that quiz.

So each lecture link would go to something like this:

For readings, I could adapt the trick I’ve been using to bring proximity to readings and homework assignments: use iframes to embed the reading in the instructions of the quiz. Then each reading link will go to something like this:

For six classes, needless to say, this will take a huge amount of time.

Now some people may say, “But Lisa, what happens when Canvas changes everything? It worries me that you might have to do all this work again!” As the Scottish policeman said in Casino Royale (1967), when it worried James Bond that he was a French police officer but had a Scots accent, “Aye, it worras me too.”

The Justification

As Jeff Goldblum’s character noted in The Big Chill (1983), it is impossible to go through the day without a juicy justification — it’s more important than sex.

So here I will defend a system in which I don’t believe: the honor system. Clearly, if everything that is assigned becomes a self-graded or auto-graded quiz, we’re on the honor system automatically.

I return to Stephen Downes’ idea of education: that it is the role of professors to model and demonstrate, and the role of students to practice and reflect. I think, frankly, that reflection is dead when the content and tasks are disaggregated. So what’s left is practice. The doing of history is what’s important, and I will grade it when they do it: writing assignments will always be graded by me. The rest will be (ungraded) practice, for points.

This will create an environment of trust (um….ok) and responsibility for learning (yes indeedy). [Suppressing cynicism will become my new watchword. Whiskey may become important.]

But wait, there’s more!

Possible further changes, then, after the zillions of hours making quizzes for the unquizzable, would include:

1) changing from weighted categories to points accumulation, because there’s no point in weighting anything

2) returning to Modules (which I just happily jettisoned) to force task completion

3) using Modules as the ugly home page to eliminate beautifying a Home page no one uses

4) eliminating the weekly pages I decided to keep instead of using Modules, which would entail losing all my introductory videos because it’s stupid to put a 2-minute Voki on a quiz

5) eliminating all multiple-choice quizzes because (a) I get too many student questions about them, (b) it isn’t really practicing to do them, and (c) Canvas can’t properly handle test banks anyway and I’m always having to fix them

6) vigorous use of James Jones’ brilliant due dates spreadsheet to make sure everything is dated properly

7) sorting out the remaining problems: getting students to the Information page (which is a FAQ they need), and forcing them to return to a Discussion that they think is completed after only one post

Thomas Jones Barker, Death of Captain Nolan (1855)

The internet’s not for learning?

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

I confess to being depressed by a summer article in The Economist, “The second half of humanity is joining the internet” (June 6). In the spirit of Thorstein Veblen’s critique, poorer parts of the world are getting on the internet*, mostly though mobile phones. And even fewer people there than in the developed world are using this online time to learn things.

The Economist article did not specifically count online courses, only “education information/services”, but the use is pretty low. And it likely includes looking up something on Wikipedia so you can win a game, or checking the weather.

People everywhere do the same thing: use the internet mostly for “timepass” – passing the time by communicating with friends and family, playing games, and watching videos. I’m not saying these things don’t cause learning. They do. But the purpose is entertainment and emotional satisfaction, not becoming an educated citizen.

It just serves to remind me how truly wide the gulf is between those who value education for its long-term benefits, and those who just want to pass the time. Are the people who get satisfaction from intellectual challenges rare? If so, will the smartphones make them even more rare?

Because that’s the crux of the issue. When all this internet-y, web-by stuff began, we educators were all excited. Vast libraries of information! Massive open online classes! Anyone can learn anything from anywhere!

I’m not anti-entertainment. I’m a huge classic movie fan, and I watch a lot of TV programs where one character calls another “Inspector”. I read modern novels just for fun, or to get to sleep. I’m not always working, always teaching, or always learning.

But I am again reminded of the old Zits cartoon:


The internet relies on huge servers, and uses tons of resources. It only seems “clean”. The mobile phones contain rare earths, the servers are so hot they need to be in the Arctic, the power plants chug away so we can have long power strips full of our charging device plugs. It’s odd to make that sacrifice just so that people can play Fortnite from anywhere.

Perhaps our goals were too utopian. The article points out that our vision of the subsistence farmer checking weather on his phone to save his crop doesn’t really happen. But why shouldn’t everyone use the internet for whatever they like? And can’t we learn wonderful things on our own? Some little boy somewhere is watching a Zeffirelli clip on YouTube and is inspired to become a great set designer. Some little girl is watching the US women’s soccer team and will be a great player. Is formal education a more important use of technology?

After two decades online, however, I am saddened that there hasn’t been a little more educational uptake and a little less “Whasup?”.

 

* I used to be very careful to distinguish the web from the internet — the internet is the entire online structure, while the web is the world wide web accessed through a browser. The recent dominance of the “app” and sites requiring log-in is closing the web, and has become the most-used aspect of the internet other than email.

Ending the reading/quiz cycle

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

I certainly didn’t mean for the relationship to end suddenly. It has been tenuous for awhile, various arguments and complaints, but I always thought it was a communication problem. But finally I had to walk away.

In my History of England class, the textbook has been an issue for a long time. The most suitable and available academic text, by the Messrs Roberts, is two volumes, so that won’t work. The class is, unfortunately, only one semester (we have two for the history of the U.S., with a much shorter history). And realistically, even one volume is asking for trouble.

All the books I’ve used, including works by Roy Strong, Asa Briggs, and F.E. Halliday are outdated, out of print, or both. These have been replaced by volumes that sell well in the U.K., but require a previous knowledge lacking in American students: works by Jeremy Black, Simon Schama, and Simon Jenkins. I’ve been using the Penguin Illustrated History, which I love. It’s visual, I’ve written a bunch of quizzes for it, and it’s beautifully written. But students have become less enthusiastic, and it’s outdated now anyway.

Besides, it costs money. All my other classes require only my own pdf textbook, freely downloadable and printable. We are now required to indicate in the class registration system if we have a low-cost or no-cost class, so that automatically creates competition among classes as students realize they can take a class for less money. This was my last class with a textbook that had to be purchased, and it wasn’t easy for the bookstore, or students online, to find an inexpensive copy. So I unceremoniously dumped the textbook, and spend a couple of weeks this summer downloading, editing, and reformatting appropriate pages from the web. Then I wrote matching quizzes.

Canvas is not user friendly when it comes to importing, editing, and reusing quizzes, in any format. It’s test banks are obscure and hard to use. The result of my machinations was a set of single-question, matching quizzes for the new readings, and my old (now five-question) multiple-choice quizzes for my lecture. So I put one due Wednesday and the other Sunday.

Well, now the weekly course page was becoming really cluttered:

I don’t want to go all Copernican on this, but if I were a student it’s starting to look like hoops to jump through, instead of ways to explore material.

So I thought, what do I want them to get out of the reading anyway? My lectures already have a good outline of the main events of English political, social, and cultural history. And the depth is already provided by the documents we “read and discuss” (i.e. annotate in Perusall) each week. These readings are pretty intense for today’s community college students (Magna Carta, Archbishop Cranmer). So instead of adding new readings, it may be better to have them deal with these documents more.

I spent yesterday deleting all the quizzes, both lecture and reading. Instead, I’m having each student submit a “Document analysis paragraph” which uses all the names of the documents to support any single idea they have about the era we’re studying. I made a silly sample paragraph to model what I want them to do:

It’s in the form of a single-question graded survey, which will automatically apply points if they turn it in, so I can read them at my leisure and communicate individually with students who are struggling. And now students are doing, not reading and quizzing.

And thus I’ve broken the entire reading/quiz cycle in one swoop. I didn’t set out to do this — it just happened. But I’m pretty sure I’ll have no regrets.

 

Easy (for students) messaging in Canvas

Lisa M Lane

Canvas’ messaging system sucks. Always has. Its new and improved version isn’t much better.

If you’re a student, and you want to email your instructor, there’s no easy way. You have to know that among the ever-proliferating global items in the far left menu, “Inbox” means the internal messaging system. You must also know already that it is for both “in” and “out” messages.

Then you need to know that this symbol is to write a message:

So you click there and it’s blank. If you have more than one class in Canvas, you must use the dropdown to select your class (which means you must have memorized what the official numbering system of your class is).

Then you must use Search to find your instructor’s name (so you must know not only who that is but how to spell it), or know to select “Teachers” to find your professors.

It’s always amazed me that students ever figure it out.

So I use the “Apps” to create my own menu item that sends students directly into a Message to me.

How to:

Go to Settings – Apps. The “Filter by name” and type in Redirect. Click on that app’s logo, then Add App.

This opens the Redirect App, so fill in the blanks.

The Name is what you want it to say in the course menu. The URL is your version of this:

https://miracosta.instructure.com/conversations?context_id=course_15859&user_id=83&user_name=Lisa%20M%20Lane

Change the server to your college’s canvas server, the course id to that particular course (it’s in its URL), and the user id and Canvas name to yours. Be sure to uncheck “Force open in new tab” and instead check “Show in Course Navigation”. Add the app, go back to Home, and you should see it in the course menu. Test it!

If you make a mistake or want to revise, use Settings – Apps – View App Configurations.

Now when a student clicks on that item in the menu, a Message opens, with your name as recipient and the course name already chosen. Not easy for us (you have to change the course id number every term) but definitely easier for them.

 

 

 

Class annotation of images

Lisa M Lane

This is another post where I share how I did something, solely so I don’t forget how to do it.

Perusall is a wonderful program for annotating documents with a whole class, and I’m currently using it for all my online classes, which are located in the horror of an LMS they call Canvas. I upload a PDF, and students and I can highlight the document, with a panel popping up for discussion. When anyone clicks on the question mark, it indicates a request for responses. When anyone uses @Someone, it notifies them someone has responded. I have used it to solve the “what if they don’t do the reading?” problem, since we all kind of do the reading together.

All this is great. The system “auto-grades” (though I have to set it then check it very carefully), and pushes the grades to Canvas gradebook on my command, so I can focus on the discussion itself instead of evaluating it.

But you can’t do this with images — just upload and everyone talk about it.

Except…you can. Perusall won’t upload images natively, nor link to images directly on the web. So I downloaded an image, and saved it as a pdf in Preview, then uploaded it. Then I clicked on a section of the picture. Instead of highlighting text, Perusall put a pin. I can then ask a question or make a comment about just that portion of the image. Click the pin, and the conversation panel opens.

But the interface itself takes up a lot of the screen, which we don’t want for images. So I’m going to show students what to do about that:

If they do it, then it will look like this:

More room for the image, less clutter. I’m thinking it would be possible to put several images on a page to be discussed for that week.

What it’s doing is similar to ThingLink, which I learned about from our wonderful art historians over a decade ago. But ThingLink and similar programs, although they can be embedded into Canvas with iframes, cannot track a student’s comments, nor auto-grade them. Perusall can, which shortens my workflow so I can focus on the discussion, just as I do with annotated text.

So, annotations for images when I teach a European history course that focuses on the Humanities, and a History of Technology class that can get bogged down in text? I’m in!

 

The hour before the deadline

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

We all have stories, usually told while shaking ones head, of how students do things at the last minute.

Long ago, the deadlines for my online classes were set at 5 pm on the day something was due. But “everyone else” (the dozen or so others teaching online) set theirs at Sunday midnight. I would receive panicked emails between 5 pm and midnight, or after an assignment was graded late. So my nicely planned evenings of sitting and marking papers didn’t work. I changed my deadlines to Sunday midnight.

So when I began using Perusall for annotations, I asked, repeatedly, for students to participate beginning on Tuesday and ending Sunday midnight. Some do so. But many try to read five documents and cram in all the annotations on Sunday. This prevents the close reading I had intended by assigning annotations in the first place, an issue for another post. But it also provides a bizarre opportunity.

Perusall emails me when a student answers a question I’ve posted.  It also emails when a student tags me with an @. Throughout each Sunday, these emails increase, with a flood of them in the last hour: 11 pm to midnight.

If I go into Perusall on Sunday night between 11 pm and midnight, I can participate in the discussion, adding questions and using @ to reply to individual students, and I’ll get a response. It becomes almost synchronous.

I’m not saying I do this every week and every class, but if I’ve assigned a particularly difficult document (last week’s Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer comes to mind), I can engage a great deal of the class at that hour.

No, I’m not recommending this. But it does seem to open potential for the last hour before the deadline. I have a colleague who uses Google Docs and notices that same activity shortly before the deadline — he sees the number of participant bubbles at the top increase as he watches.

So I wonder two things. First, is it safe now that we have many online classes to change deadlines to a more reasonable hour? And is the last hour before the deadline an opportunity to teach that we should be using?

The placement of things

Lisa M Lane

Where’s my stuff?

The placement of things is important. As with medieval manuscripts, what is not stored properly is essentially lost to all humanity. After 20 years working online, I here report on where I keep things at present.

Public ok or intended: Google

My syllabuses are on Google Docs anyone can view, department business and drafts are Docs for others to share and edit, student surveys are in Google Forms. My slide presentations for class are Google Slides (it’s a damn shame you can’t do music easily on the slideshows – they really are letting it, um, slide). My talking head videos are on YouTube with captions.

MiraCosta College only: Canvas

As all our college’s instructors move to the Canvas LMS (more’s the pity), this becomes the default. Of course, once everyone has 143 course cards showing on their main screen, scroll weariness is bound to set in and many won’t be accessed. The extremely limited discussion functionality of the system will also discourage open discussion (as will the fact that admins can access it on request at any time). Nevertheless, campus projects as well as courses are popping up like so many daisies. I remember this happening with Blackboard. The college has a server where I kept my home page, but they declared these are being deleted due to security issues (which my pages didn’t have, BTW).

The only LTI I use in Canvas consistently is Perusall, where I have uploaded the primary sources for students to read and discuss. Hypothes.is is always on the back burner, as I wait for automatic group logins and an easier interface.

Stuff I want to control: Reclaim

My shared hosted account at Reclaim Hosting is where I am moving (or have moved) everything which I want control, including privacy settings. This blog is there.

It also serves my zillions of web pages that make up my class content (lectures, information pages, etc.) which I embed or link to from Canvas. I have left Dropbox and use Owncloud via the Reclaim server installation; I have left Netvibes and use TinyTinyRSS via the Reclaim server. I am still seeking a substitute for Diigo (which will import it as well).

Mail: Various + Gmail aggregation

MiraCosta has its own mail server, which uses Outlook, a system I find needlessly cumbersome and relatively feature-free. I POP that into Gmail — it’s only inconvenient when people use the Outlook groups. I have two Gmail accounts, one personal and one professional, inside Google, so that’s obviously Gmail. My main personal email is run from Reclaim with my domain, and IMAP’d into Gmail. All mail comes in with tags so I know what’s what. I also back up my Gmail to Apple Mail (which I don’t otherwise use).

Research

After much flailing around, it’s Zotero for gathering resources and bibliographical entries, and (at last) Scrivener for drafting. Manual backups to hard drives. Diigo still for gathering web resources (I’m still working on that – any suggestions for self-hosted?).

Things That Mustn’t Get Lost

Everything crucial is on hard drives: one for work, one for household, one for work media files, one that backs up the others. Dreamweaver to ftp back and forth to the Reclaim servers.

Bric a brac around the web

I’ve had more services close down on me than most people ever used, which helped foster my natural cynicism about web services. I still have a Tumblr account with things I have stored, though I rarely access it – it’s like a time capsule now. I have zillions of accounts (Slideshare, Blabber, things you’ve never heard of going back to the beginning of the millennium) that won’t let me delete them.

Videos that YouTube won’t serve, or for which I want excellent quality, are on Vimeo. I have a Pinterest account I sometimes use for collecting web images, and once used for an Honors class. I have a Flickr account that won’t be used anymore as they have created limits and pricing and I’m not sure why I need it, so it’s a time capsule too. I’d rather sort out how to do galleries on this blog.

Phones and downgrading

In several areas, I have remained static while others have moved on, because some things just work: Microsoft Word and Excel, Dreamweaver. The changeover to Canvas LMS left me unlikely to jump at new shiny technologies for teaching.

Privacy issues play havoc with my calendar. For decades I carried a paper calendar, first small, then large, then small again. Now I use the Calendar on my mobile phone, which is Google and Android, so it tries to force everything into the first category: Public. I don’t want my Calendar public. After trying to make different apps and reminders work on my phone, and being encouraged by this recent NY Times article, I am about to downgrade back to paper. I carry a paper notebook anyway, after (again) trying to use my phone. For notifications, I’ll set them manually — it’s a lot easier to do that for a few things than adjust them all for the rest of the crap.

Ethical issues are a problem with Facebook, where I belong to several groups and run the Online Teaching Group. For the latter, I have people asking to join for purposes that have nothing to do with sharing online teaching problems and solutions: I get requests from highly questionable “education” organizations, people who want to advertise, people soliciting sex or money. Combine this with Facebook’s privacy problems (I stopped using it for student groups long ago), and I am encouraged to downgrade (thus the new listserv).

Since I’m sure I’ve forgotten things here, I have not solved the medieval manuscript problem. But the things I need on a daily basis are much fewer than they used to be, when I spent much of my time exploring tools on the web. Call it the downgrading of my time, if you will.

Thus my best tech winner for 2019: the MUJI double-ring A6 notebook.

Surf report

Lisa M Lane

If you’re from around here, you know what a surf report it: “moderate waves today, let’s call it waist-high” a la Scott Bass on KPBS radio.

This is a report of today’s web-surfing, which is kinda different. Sometimes it’s piled a lot higher than my waist, but today I learned a lot, much of it triggered by Twitter posts. I don’t think I’m the only one who uses the “like” heart to file things for later, so I could find these again.

History Assessments

Except the first one. Somehow I found the Stanford History Education Group, and their Beyond the Bubble assessments. I’m not sure why I’ve never heard of this, but it’s a collection of items for teaching U.S. History. While geared toward the high school AP crowd, the method here is quite useful for college history. The primary source is embedded into the assessment. So for example, there would be a newspaper engraving of a protest from Harper’s Weekly, then a short list of facts related to that engraving, then open short answer questions. Sometimes these asked students to assess the veracity of the document itself in light of the other facts, or they might ask the student to say what the source tells us about the era.

These are short (usually just two short answers) and there’s a rubric with each one, indicating the level (proficient, emergent, basic) of various student responses. Some even include sample student answers that one is likely to see. Although undoubtedly intended to be used solely by the instructor, it might be interesting to give the rubric to students and have them analyze their own work!

The site has many assessments that a teacher could download, but it was their design that gave me ideas, because I could create my own assessments for any primary source I have.

And it was kind of eerie that I had just changed all my Learning Units to be inside the assessments. I must be very trendy in terms of design!

Cycloramas

Next, I found a serious gap in my knowledge about the history of media. A tweet by Civil War historian Lisa Tendrich Frank led me to a Smithsonian Magazine article on the restoration of the cylcorama in Atlanta. Apparently, during the 1880s, cycloramas were a huge draw as entertainment. Painters created 360-degree paints, attached to the walls of a circular building, and people would come to experience it. The article notes a scene might have a dirt floor and some trees to add a reality-inducing effect.

Beginning in the 1880s, these completely circular paintings started appearing from half a dozen companies, such as the American Panorama Company in Milwaukee, where Atlanta’s canvas was conceived. APC employed more than a dozen German painters, led by a Leipzig native named Friedrich Heine.

Half a dozen companies? How could I not have known about this? This isn’t just virtual reality, it’s late 19th century entertainment for the people. The closest I’ve gotten to in-the-round entertainment was the film they used to have at Disneyland, America the Beautiful, a movie made with multiple cameras that surrounded you. Yeah, I know, in days where the Google truck drives through your neighborhood, this may seem archaic, but it was very cool.

So now I have a whole research area to discover.

Paratexts

Can I use this word in a sentence? It shouldn’t be new to me: it’s a word I keep bumping into, but somehow it never entered my thinking as something I could use.

A tweet by early Americanist Michelle Orihel sent me to Digital Paxton, and reading the post I had an Aha! moment. Advertising and editors’ notes and issue numbers, as included in Victorian periodicals, would be paratext! I may not have a theory, but I at least have a structure, an interpretation, a word I can use for what these types of things are.

Some days it’s enough to learn one new useful word.

Blackmail

The last item for today was a piece of email spam. Yes, I know you’re not supposed to open these, but there was no attachment and I decided to read it. I found it fascinating.

The title was:

Security Alert. lisa@lisahistory.net was compromised. Password must be changed.

The email went on to explain that my account had been hacked, my information and surfing habits downloaded, and they wanted money, paid in Bitcoin. The blackmailer explained how s/he got access:

How I made it:
In the software of the router, through which you went online, was a vulnerability.
I just hacked this router and placed my malicious code on it.
When you went online, my trojan was installed on the OS of your device.

I noticed that there aren’t any contractions where you’d expect, indicating this person does not speak English natively. The OS of my device?

They also claimed to know that I have pornographic habits:

A month ago, I wanted to lock your device and ask for a not big amount of btc to unlock.
But I looked at the sites that you regularly visit, and I was shocked by what I saw!!!
I’m talk you about sites for adults.

I want to say – you are a BIG pervert. Your fantasy is shifted far away from the normal course!

There’s a normal course for the viewing of pornography online? I had no idea. But that explains why so much money was being requested.

I’m know that you would not like to show these screenshots to your friends, relatives or colleagues.
I think $701 is a very, very small amount for my silence.
Besides, I have been spying on you for so long, having spent a lot of time!

Wait, $701? Cheap at twice the price!

After payment, my virus and dirty screenshots with your enjoys will be self-destruct automatically.
If I do not receive from you the specified amount, then your device will be locked, and all your contacts will receive a screenshots with your “enjoys”.

I guess we’ll see…

(Discovered after posting: turns out this is a known spam thing and I should dedicate as much worry about it as I have already done. So that’s five things learned online today!)

The other time machine

Lisa M Lane

On my travel iBook I have a sticker of a TARDIS, because my computer is a time machine (it’s also bigger on the inside than the outside).

I’ve been doing more reading in the book Culture and Education (1990), and found a paper that explored the topic of student tutors in the 19th century, and their similarity to student assistants in modern American graduate schools. I was delighted, since my own work is somewhat similar in methodology and theme.

It was written by a Myron Tuman. Since I don’t find many scholars to talk with about my work, I thought I’d look him up on the web. What happened was a time machine journey.

Academia.edu took me to his work going back to at least 1988, although it didn’t list this article I’d been reading. I discovered he had published also about online and computer issues as we both entered the increasingly online world of education. I tried to find him at the University of Alabama website, but he isn’t listed now.

I found him at RateMyProfessors, where some students laid into him back in 2006. Last month the Tuscaloosa News published a retrospective that mentioned him earning an Outstanding Professor award 25 years ago (that would be about the same time I was awarded mine). I found him on Facebook, where he posted up to the end of last year, mostly family stuff. And finally, Constant Contact took me to his retirement party (looks like about two years ago), with photos of Myron enjoying the celebration.

In other words, I went through someone’s whole career in 15 minutes, a career that ran parallel to mine in several respects. Given the recent “radio silence”, I don’t know whether I would contact him now, but in some ways it feels like I already have. That’s disorienting, to say the least.

Mass producing instructions

Lisa M Lane

One of the most annoying things about teaching many sections using an LMS is that instructions must be repeated in so many places. Partly this is because people forget from one week to the next what the instructions are, so proximity of instructions to a specific task is necessary. And we all know that students do better when instructions are repeated and reminded in at least three places.

But what happens when you want to change instructions for a particular kind of assignment?

For example, I have a set of writing instructions, one each for Writing Assignments I, II, and III. When I want to change instructions for these, I have to go into Canvas and change them one at a time. Well, that’s only three sets of instructions each for five classes, and I can cut and paste.

But I realized I wanted to change instructions for a weekly assignment, my annotation discussion. That’s 16 times for each class. I wanted all of them changed to say:

Let’s add depth to our sources, and help everyone understand them. Some ideas for how to do this:

  • at least one person should highlight the thesis or main point of each document, or speculate on what it might be if it isn’t obvious
  • post a question or two where appropriate in the document (use the question mark on your comment, or use @ to get someone’s attention)
  • answer the questions of others
  • select something you found confusing or fascinating, look it up, and tell us about what you found
  • find aspects of the primary source that seem to connect to the textbook and lecture, and tell us how they connect
  • use the picture tool to add visual sources or illustrate a point

Since this is a discussion, entries which respond, enlighten, or clarify earn more points (the phrase “I agree” is specifically disallowed!).

Comments need not be long – it’s more important to annotate throughout the document (with comments in many different areas throughout the various documents), discuss with colleagues, and make connections.

So I started doing that for 16 weeks of discussion in a course, copying and pasting for each instance. When I was done, I had to do it for the next class, and suddenly I thought, wait a minute. Why not use a web page and embed it? So I made a web page with the instructions in Dreamweaver. Then I pasted this code in the Canvas assignment:

<p><iframe src=”https://lisahistory.net/pages/docdisc.htm” width=”90%” height=”360px”></iframe></p>

I can embed it anywhere, even here:

The reason to do this isn’t just to save pasting something 16 times, since I still have to paste this 16 times. But I only have to change it 16 times once, if you follow me. If my instructions change next semester (or if I decide I forgot to add something now), I just change it on the web page, and it changes everywhere. So I’m doing it for all instructions for all assignments.

*Now, to do this sort of thing exactly as I did, you need to make a web page and serve it. But you could do it in a Google Doc, and have Google serve it for you, by sharing your Doc and using the code I shared in my recent post, which looks the same but with a Google Doc URL, like this:

<iframe src=”https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VPObOkwoBVM5GVXgXCbdKU48Cs_ZRnS-ZJLIpZYMNJE/edit?usp=sharing?embedded=true&rm=minimal&headers=false” width=”99%” height=”360px”></iframe>

I just don’t like it because you can’t really prevent scrolling easily.

Embedding Google Doc in Canvas with extras

Lisa M Lane

Last year I began creating all my syllabuses in Google Docs and embedding them in Canvas.

It was possible then to just take the URL of your Doc, and put it into an iframe, with any extras you like. I liked to remove the ruler and navigation at the top of the Doc (rm=minimal), remove the headers (headers=false) and set the width and height (width 99%, height 1200px). It was working fine, and looked like this:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/document/d/165o30E5jiFE2zUBecH6kZL3D3eTs3Dnmal8K80P8bvY/edit?rm=minimal&headers=false" width="99%" height="1200px"></iframe>

Well, now something (Canvas or Google) won’t let that happen, and you must follow the instructions for publishing your Doc to the web. Here are instructions from Tufts. Trouble is, that gives you the set iframe code to paste in, but you don’t have the extras. So here’s how I added them.

What Google publishing gave me was this:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSpS0g-4SIpMzCvSRpukiKFPX5T5PDh9Xv9uo_8d3bNyBQ5ZodmqnYoRKjTFIaZQpqr8F9yJbnVlaj-/pub?embedded=true"></iframe>

Here are the changes I made:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSpS0g-4SIpMzCvSRpukiKFPX5T5PDh9Xv9uo_8d3bNyBQ5ZodmqnYoRKjTFIaZQpqr8F9yJbnVlaj-/pub?embedded=true&rm=minimal&headers=false" width="99%" height="1200px"></iframe>

Unfortunately, this wasn’t good because “publishing” a Doc in Google freezes it somehow, and doesn’t always include the images or proper formatting. Also, I couldn’t edit the Doc from inside Canvas, which is nice to be able to do.

The better solution was to use Share rather than Publish. In the Doc, click on Share, and copy the “get shareable link” URL. Then put it into the iframe code:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MN8nGYzZvXOmOmfAPvfkAzPTm82bz1VFVpUiiI55xlc/edit?usp=sharing?embedded=true&rm=minimal&headers=false" width="99%" height="1200px"></iframe>

 

 

I also provide a link, of course, for easier printing.

 

(Updated post)